The following guest editorial was written shortly before the second Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty held in Geneva, Switzerland, August 14-September 5. It makes clear why the nuclear arms race should, but will not, be the most urgent issue of the upcoming presidential campaigns.
Robert C. Johansen was president of the Institute for World Order and author of The National Interest and the Human Interest: An Analysis of U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1980) when this article appeared. --The Editors
Of one thing I am certain--the hour is too late for business as usual, for politics as usual, or for diplomacy as usual. An alliance for survival is needed-transcending regions and ideologies--if we are to assure mankind a safe passage to the twenty-first century." In these words Jimmy Carter warned in 1976 about the danger of nuclear weapons spreading to more countries. Four years and one Carter administration later, we still have business, politics, and diplomacy as usual.
No task is more urgent than to liberate all people from the specter of nuclear war and the harmful consequences of unnecessary radiation. The planned expansion of U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals, already capable of destroying all of the world's cities seven times over, casts doubt on the rationality and spiritual sanity of present political leaders and those who support them. The proliferation of weapons-usable nuclear materials and know-how puts a growing number of countries within a few months of possessing weapons, should policymakers decide to manufacture them.
If it is not already too late to avert a chain of political and technological events leading inexorably to the employment of nuclear weapons in combat, it soon will be.
Read the Full Article
